Now that everything is moving to the cloud internet, you might think that data loss is a thing of the past. Sadly, as the past few months have taught us, this actually isn't true; we first had the Microsoft/Danger disaster, and now we have Palm and Sprint facing a class-action lawsuit over data loss for webOS phones. All this raises the question: how safe is it to store your precious data on the internet, and do you really trust the internet?

Any user generated data will be exportable in one of two forms:
1) An opaque blob that will allow the restoration of user generated content for the period of 6 months.
2) An documented data file and an API that would allow community written tools to allow restoration of user generated contents.

So users that contributed to a site, amazon reviews, pictures on flickr, comments on blogs, documents/spreatsheets, contacts, and related information could be backed up as often as the user was comfortable with. In either case the backups would be signed so that the provider could be sure that a user restores what they backed up.

Seems like that would significantly lower the risk of losing important data that's stored in some random cloud.

Any user generated data will be exportable in one of two forms:
1) An opaque blob that will allow the restoration of user generated content for the period of 6 months.
2) An documented data file and an API that would allow community written tools to allow restoration of user generated contents.

Agreed, and preferably the latter - any company hosting a person's data should provide a means for that person to fetch that data in a useful form (i.e not cryptic binary blobs, nor screen-scraping web pages).